Trump, Poland, and Conservative Catholicism

For my latest piece with The Jesuit Post, I take a look at President Donald Trump’s speech in Poland and its resonance with conservative Catholics in the United States.

Here’s an excerpt:

There are five reasons for [the connection between Trump and conservative Catholics] and each emerges at least once, if not multiple times, in the Polish speech. Primarily, Trump’s discourse points to the core of conservatism, a core that the Catholic Church shares: the necessity of conserving the wisdom of the past. Second, the speech revels in the role of the Church in Poland’s and the broader West’s defeat of totalitarian communism in Europe. Next, Trump shifts his gaze towards “radical Islamic terrorism,” an enemy of both the United States and Catholicism. At the level of theory, the speech hints at St. John Paul II’s teaching of philosophical “personalism,” which contains conclusions that many conservative Catholics and Republicans hold in common. Finally, the President’s pro-life rhetoric energizes Catholics who have been waiting eight years to make national progress on rights for the unborn.